Newspaper Article

Obituary: Denis ApIvor ; Composer neglected for six decades by the musical establishment

Anderson, Martin

2004

Overview

ApIvor's friendship with [Constant Lambert] led to his sole run of public successes. Shortly before his drink-driven death in 1951, Lambert recommended ApIvor to the choreographer Andree Howard, resulting in commissions for five ballets, among them A Goodman of Paris, A Mirror for Witches (based on the Salem witch-hunt that would soon stir Arthur Miller) and, the most successful of all, the Lorca- inspired Blood Wedding, which took the stage in countries from Turkey to Chile. ApIvor felt an especial sympathy with Lorca (he eventually translated his complete poetry, over a thousand pages), and the impact of Blood Wedding brought a further commission, for the opera Yerma. ApIvor moved to Trinidad, where he had taken a part-time medical post (he was now qualified as an anaesthetist) to carry him through the composition of Yerma; he completed the orchestration back in Britain, in a cottage near Sudbury. Under the influence of [Peter Warlock] and van [Bernard van Dieren], of whose works he generously prepared a number of performing editions, ApIvor's earliest style had been a kind of chromatically inflected diatonicism; he admitted that Stravinsky, too, had had a bearing on his ballets. In the late 1950s his music began to move towards serialism, reinforced from 1960 by an acquaintance with recordings of Webern - though his vocal music always remained lyrical. Even when serialism became the dominant dogma of the day, it aided ApIvor not a whit: William Glock at the BBC turned down his major work of the 1960s, the [Dylan Thomas] cantata Altarwise by Owl-Light (1961).

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: ApIvor, Denis / Lambert, Constant / Rawsthorne, Alan